Not So Perfect
Chapter One: Dress Rehearsals
A/N: I've always LOVED HSM, and decided to make my own fanfiction. Starts out with the usual pairs, but eventual Tropay. Hope you like it! This chapter is also fairly short, mainly to set the stage and I thought it'd be a good place to end it. :)
Disclaimer: If I owned High School Musical, I would be a part of the Disney Channel. I am neither, so I own… pretty much nothing.
Sharpay Evans wasn't angry about the fact that she didn't get her part. She was furious.
She crunched into one of Zeke's cookies, the crumbs falling all over her Calculus homework. Brushing them off, she stared angrily at a problem that refused to be solved. Throwing her pencil down in defeat, Sharpay stared moodily at the ceiling, chomping into the cookie as it got smaller and smaller. Once the cookie had been devoured, she stared longer at the whitewashed walls, composing herself.
Sharpay refused to lose, and all she got to be was the crummy understudy for some pi math freak. But she couldn't possibly do anything to endanger the show. As much as she wanted to be the lead, Sharpay was far too in love with shows to know that sabotaging an audition was one thing; sabotaging a show was another.
So now here she was, stuck in her living room doing Calculus homework, helpless to the fact that the golden performance pair had been outdone for the first time in eleven years.
And Zeke, despite his superb baking skills, was a bit of an idiot.
He was sweet and he meant well, but Sharpay couldn't help wondering if the only thing that was in his brain was a sack full of recipes and a basketball. Sharpay had humored him for a while, but he was too clingy, always baking her cookies, constantly asking her out ever since the moment his cookies had caused an intense lapse in Sharpay's common sense.
The door to the house opened and closed. "Sharpay! You're missing rehearsal!" a voice panted from the door.
Supremely unconcerned, Sharpay pushed her chair back, shoved her math book out of her face and slowly made her way over to the door. "Did I?" she asked, though she knew perfectly well that she had. "It must have slipped my mind."
Flinging her jacked over her shoulder, she strode out with Ryan right beside her. Sharpay opened the car door and stepped into the car, the engine still running. Backing out of her driveway, Sharpay made her way to the school's parking lot, feeling discontent. She could always do something about the things that were wrong in her life, but this time, there really was no way out. She probably wouldn't perform with Ryan in the Spring Musicale, due to Troy and Gabriella's intense popularity among the student body and Ms. Darbus.
And then after the Spring Musicale, there was nothing. Ah, the joys of being a senior.
Parking, the siblings walked over to the theatre, stepping inside. It was the first day of dress rehearsal, and Gabriella was in her gorgeous black dress. She walked over to the stage, where Ms. Darbus was looking over the costumes one last time.
"Ah! Sharpay, Ryan, I would expect you two to be on time, of all people! As I have told you so many times, the theatre waits for no one… not even you two," she told them briskly, adjusting the seams on Sharpay's dress.
Sharpay pasted on an extra sweet smile, approaching the other girl. "Gabriella!" she exclaimed. "Did I ever tell you that dress looks great on you?"
Gabriella smiled. "Thanks Sharpay! Why were you late?"
"Oh, I was busy doing my calculus homework," Sharpay waved off. "There was a lot of it tonight, wasn't there?"
"Yeah…" Gabriella trailed off, distracted as Troy walked up to her and started talking to her. Pretending to look perfectly content, Sharpay walked backstage, where she leaned against the wall, hiding any sign of her fuming anger. Darbus was not supposed to give Gabriella her dress. She'd taken great labors into sewing the dress together, and she wasn't about to let some science geek who had won her out wear it. It was adding insult onto injury.
Not to mention that Gabriella had managed to snag the only boy Sharpay relatively had feelings for. She'd done it without trying, and it infuriated the blonde girl. Throwing her hair behind her shoulder, she walked back onstage, where Gabriella was running her lines with Troy.
It was the scene where Minnie and Arnold were deciding to run away from their small Twinkletowne in order to get married.
In Sharpay's opinion, it was the most puke-worthy scene in the whole play, the new golden couple gazing into each other's eyes and swapping spit onstage. The only reason why they were actually good at it was because they actually had feelings for each other. If they didn't, their acting would have been terrible. But Darbus lapped it all up like a hungry alley cat and smiled and simpered at them, congratulating their acting and their singing.
Scoffing, Sharpay sat at the left stage exit, her legs and arms crossed. As a supporting role, she wasn't in this scene, and she took her anger out by glaring daggers into the black curtains.
A black dress walked into her view and then back out of it. Then a pair of slacks came into view and didn't budge. Looking up, Sharpay saw Troy Bolton's face.
"Sharpay."
"Troy," she acknowledged.
"You're not… going to do anything, are you?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, looking up at the boy impatiently. "If you think I'm stupid enough to put the whole show in jeopardy just because I didn't get the lead, you obviously don't know me, Troy Bolton. Plus, I'm over that, remember? I'm perfectly fine having a supporting role."
"Are you—"
"I'm sure. Was that all? Asking me if I was going to kill your chances to perform?" Sharpay asked, some of the ice crawling into her voice.
"No, no!" Troy exclaimed, looking a little flushed. "I'm sorry, I just thought that…"
"That I'd ruin the show."
"Well not exactly, I was just having doubts about…"
"Whether I was telling the truth or not."
"A little, but…"
"I can't blame you because I tried to get you kicked out of the auditions, right?" Sharpay gave Troy a cold smile, who looked slightly dumbstruck. Standing up, she looked him straight in the eye. "Listen, it's two weeks before the show. I told you already. I would not, and will not do anything to ruin the it."
Sharpay walked off, looking for Ryan. Where had he gone? Their next scene was up, and she couldn't even find the worthless boy. Everyone else was onstage. Troy was talking to Darbus and the rest of the ensemble and supporting cast members were chatting onstage. When she heard Ryan's voice mingling with the others, Sharpay rolled her eyes, ready to walk back to the stage, when a shriek emitted from the stairs ten feet to her left. There was thumping, a crash, and then silence.
Rushing towards the staircase, Sharpay looked down.
At the bottom of the stairwell, the unconscious body of Gabriella Montez lay sprawled out on the floor.